∆ The only way is forwards.

A cloud... drifting 'forwards'... Have you ever seen one going backwards?

Can 'timelessness' give us the
false impression of a temporal order?

A critical
question is, if everything can only just be here now moving and interacting,
but not over time, would that be enough to give the illusion or impression of
time passing. Could it give the illusion of time passing, in a single
direction,an arrow of time, and a
steadily accumulating past ‘history’?

One of the
reasons we may have a biased view without seeing it clearly, is because we
humans are all pretty much the same model. That is we all walk around the Earth
seeing things, and copying observations to our collection of knowledge. This
makes sense, and it gives us the impression of some great ‘forward trend’, because
we accumulate or group together and pile up this information. But there are problems
with this view.

We seem to
ignore the fact that when we are dying, and after death while our bodies are
decomposing, surely all our knowledge, or grey-matter in-formation must be
dispersing back into the world in some way. Whether it does this and gets lost
in some quantum shuffle, or just disperses intact. In this way the opposite of
us seeming to always accumulate new acts happens, but we don’t see it.

Also while we
take our accumulating or condensing of knowledge as evidence that history is
passing, and more and more events have happened, we also take the idea that ‘the
universe is expanding into an identity less, information less heat death’ – as more
proof that time flows and has a direction.

So the
accumulation of information, and the dissipation of information, are both taken
as ‘things that happen forwards’ and so taken to be more evidence that time
exists, and has a direction, or arrow.

But have you
ever stopped to think just how many things we automatically see as not just
moving, but always moving ‘forwards’?

Forward march.

Picture: A shoal of fish, but are they all heading in different directions? or all going forwards?

It is of course a semantic issue just what we call any particular direction. But quite what this semantic matter hides might not be as simple as we think.

Let’s say we decide
to explore the world in and around myself, but at the start, we say ‘if we see
anything moving, in any direction at all, we are going to call the direction it
moves in ‘forwards’. We stick to this, no matter whether two things are heading
in opposite directions or at right angles to each other, we always call the
direction they are moving forwards.

So we see that
animals and birds run or fly forwards. Every fish in the ocean, alive and swimming
or being carried by the tide moves forwards. Trees and animals alike take nutrients
forwards into their bodies, and grow
outwards, or forwards from their centre. And as a dead animal decomposes, or a
tree rots or burns, the particles making it up must move forwards, away from the
remains, until all are gone.

Space ships,
trains, boats and cars all travel forwards, even if there is an ‘R’ for reverse
on the controls, if we stand in front of something apparently ‘reversing’ we better
see this as it basically moving ‘blunt end first’ and forwards towards us!

Matter, in
space, always falls forwards to make planets and stars. Light pours forwards
out of those stars while they burn, and their remains explode outwards, and
forwards into space when they go critical. Meteorites and Space ships travel
forwards into space, and forwards back to earth.

We put food
forwards into our mouths, it travels forwards through our body and forwards out
of us as heat, sweat, hair, nails, or waste. As we take an in breathe, air
moves forwards into our lungs, oxygen moves forwards out of the air into the
blood, which circulates forwards around the body, such that carbon dioxide can
also move forwards out of the blood, into the lungs where it is expelled in an
out breath. An out breath that can clearly be felt as moving forwards, if we move a hand, forwards, to cover the
mouth and feel its direction.

Light and sound
travel forwards to our eyes and ears, to create impulses that travel forwards
to our brains, and that may form a series of mental impressions that accumulate,
or grow forwards , just as a note book gets filled, forwards, from front to
back, and as a pile of notebooks grows upwards or along a shelf, forwards.

Finally we go out for a walk, forwards of course, and look up at the clouds in the sky... Have you ever seen one moving backwards?

What does this prove or disprove?

So if we decide
to call all directions forwards, then everything seems to move forwards, from
here it is hard to even imagine what other direction there could be and easy to
get the idea that because so many things seem to all move forwards, that there
is some universal ‘forwards’ to everything. And we may call that universal forwards
‘time’, and say that time is the thing
that makes everything move ‘forwards’.

Now there are a
couple of subtle points here. The main part of this piece is to highlight our
probably often unseen bias to seeing every direction as being ‘forwards’ and
then wondering why we don’t see many ‘backwards’ ness. But in seeing this we shouldn’t
ignore that there does seem to be a genuine, one way, unfolding of the
universe. An unstoppable spreading out, diffusing, or cooling down, into what
is known as a universal ‘heat death’. But in seeing this we should be careful
as to what we make it mean.

If we assume that
time exists, then this one way unfolding may be taken as ‘proof’ that time does
exist, and has a forwards direction to it. But, alone, the one way unfolding of
all things only proves that all things are unfolding ‘now’. Not, that ‘time’
also exists, and the future exists, and the past exists.

So if we assume
time exists, then these observations seem to confirm this assumption. Which is fine, as long as times existence has
been proven elsewhere. But we must bear in mind that alone, the observations do
not ‘prove’ that time exists.

If we just
assume what we can see, i.e. that matter exists, and that it can move and
change and interact where gravity and energy etc are in play – then we find that
this to seems to be confirmed by the observation that things move in all
directions… whether we call all these directions ‘forwards’ or not.